abraxaslogs | [open] I was tame, I was gentle, til the circus life made me mean

With all these leftover memories lingering in a haze, it could be that some part of him is still trying to make up for things that never happened. But he could also just use a friend right now, and River feels more familiar than she should. He's tired of losing people, of finally finding a good thing only for the universe to take it back like it was a mistake. For the same reason, he couldn't give up on mending what fell apart between him and River in that other life.

At her suggestion, he tilts a curious look at her.

"What is it?" Then a flicker of a smile, which makes his golden freckles catch the sunlight. That's another thing that stuck around after he woke up. "Or is it a surprise?"

River has spent the last two weeks more or less staring at her bedroom wall as an immortal being's lifetime flashed before her. She remembers everything, even things the goddess called Serenity had forgotten in her delirium. The things she'd done, the people she'd hurt. The chaotic nature of her magic and her total loss of control. The weight of seeing past, present, and future all at once; the loneliness of her self-imposed isolation to avoid the pain of feeling the countless lives that would rise and fall across the ages.

She remembers it all, and she is terrified of that future. There is no going back to "business as usual" for her. Not if it's what sends her down that path.

No. She has to start over. Wilhelm was one of her very first friends in Abraxas. She doesn't want to let that rift form between them again. Maybe this is a chance to start over.

"It's a surprise." A peace offering of sorts - the same one he had given her in a time that never was. She smiles lightly, eager to show him, then eyes the bike he has yet to put away. "Should we get this one home first? We don't want Kyle to worry."

"Okay," he agrees, his grin growing. "Kyle doesn't need more reasons to worry."

Returning to the path, Wilhelm leads River back to the carriage house, where the delivery bikes have a corner allotted to them. It's a short trek, and he lets it settle into companionable quiet. He points out some of the flowers to her, passes on their names which he has learned from Lucifer — see, you can tell because of how the petals curl up.

He doesn't know anymore if he remembers this from his real life, hours spent crouched down in the dirt with Lucifer while the archangel carried out his punishment-turned-hobby — or from that other life, in which Lucifer raised a paradise from the once dying Nether.

Once the bike is stowed, he turns to River.

"So where is this surprise you want to show me?"

River listens to Wilhelm's chatter in a contented silence as they walk. She knows a lot about plants by way of having an encyclopedic knowledge of many things since early childhood, but it's nice to hear his voice and the general fondness of the memories associated with it - if not for their confusing other life, then at least for Lucifer's presence, something River grew to greatly enjoy in that lost time.

She'll have to start over there too, eventually. A problem for another day; one thing at a time.

"It's in the Horizon." She kind of gives him a meaningful look before glancing around, hinting at the need for privacy. "We could find a garden to hide in, unless you want to go to your room?"

She's seen enough of her own room to last a lifetime at this point, but she wouldn't object to going there if he's uncomfortable with a girl being in his bedroom.

There's a lot to untangle. He holds more memories than should fit in the span of the relationships he's built, and their edges are blurring and running into one another. Time feels like it's been stretched and twisted in impossible shapes, and another version of himself perches in the back of his mind. On top of that, Wilhelm has to sort through the more mundane but no less complex mess of losing, probably forever, someone he loves.

He doesn't know what to do except try to keep pushing forward. Even one step at a time, it's hard.

"Let's go to my room."

As long as River is comfortable with it, he's comfortable too. Despite the imposing castle walls, he would feel too vulnerable falling into the necessary meditative trance out here.

When they arrive, he holds the door for her. Inside, the room is...in about the state you'd expect from a teenage boy left to his own devices for too long. One of the beds, clearly Wilhelm's, is a nest of blankets with discarded clothes crumpled on the floor around it. The nightstand is piled with books, bits of paper smudged with ink, and several pilfered plates and cups from the dining room. By another bed, Kell's things spill out of trunks that he has yet to properly unpack. At least Wilhelm has a place to hang his messenger bag by the door.

"Sorry for the mess," he offers sheepishly as he shows River to the sitting area by the fireplace. The mantle too is cluttered, but perhaps in a more forgivable way, with souvenirs of Wilhelm's time in this world. There's a small menagerie of frogs, including an intricately painted mask, a wooden carving, and a glass figurine.

Her eyes are wide and curious as she enters his room, looking around and seeing more than just the objects laying around. Places have a way of holding onto the things that happened there, memories and emotions that can linger in the air, and bedrooms tend to be people's most personal sanctum.

Wilhelm has been in Abraxas for a long time, their lost centuries aside. River doesn't know if he's stayed in this same room the whole time, but certainly others have come and gone; maybe she could find the name for his grief if she looked hard enough.

But she doesn't go prying. She goes up to the fireplace instead, eyeing each frog curiously as she drags her fingers across the mantle. There are more memories here too, of course. At least he has some friends to keep him company.

"Mess is a sign of a place that's been lived in." Easy enough to say for someone that doesn't clean her room. She reaches out as though to touch the painted mask, then thinks better of it and turns around to face him again. "Your roommates don't seem to mind, anyway."

Loneliness hangs about the room like smoke. Self-loathing, anxiety, and grief all gather in the corners like dust, things he has shed and grown again and again. But there are lighter emotions fluttering around too. He had loved here, and been loved for a short, bright time. Happiness, hope, belonging, all tentatively taking flight. Desire, floating in a warm cloud around his bed curtains.

He wonders what River is thinking as she peers around his room. He has always gotten the sense that she sees things in a way that nobody else can.

"It's just Kell and me," he says, settling into one of the comfortable armchairs arranged in front of the dark fireplace. There are two other beds in the room. One had belonged to Elrond, his first roommate, nearly a year ago now. The other, Kelson's until recently, has sadness drawn tight around it like a curtain. A moment late, he realizes she might have been talking about the assorted frogs.

"Oh, uh...they get to have a place of honor here, so they can't complain."

Ah. And there it is, the name coming to her like she could snatch it out of thin air. River never spoke to Kelson herself but she remembers seeing him around, can see the empty space left behind in this room and Wilhelm's broken heart. But there's more here too; there's the warm presence of a friend that moved in in a rush to make sure Wilhelm doesn't wallow in that sadness for too long.

It all feels loosely related, or at least in River's odd way of thinking. They get to have a place of honor here. She smiles faintly and doesn't respond, sitting in the chair opposite of him by the fireplace.

"I want to show you my domain. I have something for you."

There's a quiet note of pride for the fact of having a domain at all after being unable to reach the Horizon for so long, but it's paired with a hint of melancholy for knowing their false life is the reason it feels as easy as breathing now. River eases back into the chair and closes her eyes.

"Don't get lost. Just follow me."

He'd been to her domain in the unreality but it's a little bit different now. She'll wait for him to silently walk through the forest together.

He doesn't know that the Horizon was once barred to her, doesn't realize just how crowded and noisy a place her mind is. But he can hear the pride shining through her declaration, and he can tell that this is important to her. Maybe it's because he once had to fight to tame his fire, but Wilhelm gets the sense that for her this is the culmination of some sort of struggle.

Closing his eyes and measuring breaths, he slips into the Horizon. Because he affixes River in his mind, he finds himself at the edge of a wood that's not unfamiliar, but not the same as he remembers either. Twilight colors the sky purple and stars begin to peek through.

That's where he sees River, waiting in the gathering shadows, and he catches up to her. In the Horizon, he still wears the sort of clothes he used to wear back home, a polo shirt with a jacket thrown over it, jeans and sneakers, an expensive watch that once belonged to his brother. But there are subtle changes, influenced by his evolving sense of style. The jacket is a little flashier than he would've felt comfortable with a few years ago, deep purple in color. His nails are painted green, much neater than he can manage in real life. And around his neck, he still has the necklace Kelson gave him, a pendant of polished white crystal that looks like the moon, which he never takes off.

"Lead the way, River." He starts to offer his arm, remembering that other life where they knew each other so well, but then he's not sure if she's comfortable with that.

It was a point of contention for her, with how beautiful and liberating everyone said it was. She wonders what's different now, if the dream really has changed her and her connection to the Singularity even if it was all a lie.

Now stepping into the Horizon is as easy as a deep exhale, and River appears in a loose, flowy dress that always has the symbol of the Fool etched over her heart. Her feet are bare, unbothered by the dirt and wildlife growing along the underbrush of the forest. And when Wilhelm offers his arm, the way Eddie and Sylvain and so many others had only for her to shy away or evaporate entirely before they could touch her -

Well. Things are different now, and so is she. So she smiles faintly and loops her arm through Wilhelm's the way she would've before she lost herself in Serenity, and then she leads them into the enchanted forest. It's vibrantly alive in color and sound and creatures that glow or shift around in the shadows, trees that sway in the wind and stars that twinkle cheerfully from above.

She doesn't really speak again until they reach their destination, where the waterfalls create a discordant sense of music as water flows through the pools and things land in the water from the forest above. River loves this place, her face immediately lightening just by being here, and she leads Wilhelm to one pool in specific where he might notice some familiar creatures hopping around the rocks.

"Here." She releases his arm to crouch down beside the colorful frogs he had created for her in that alternate reality. She smiles warmly at them, not quite looking in his direction. "They get to have a place of honor."

The quiet is comfortable, with her arm resting in his. Wilhelm occupies himself with taking in the scenery, ferns that brush his legs as he walks by, trees alive in the breeze, and a canopy of constellations peeking through the outstretched boughs. At the edge of the pool, surprise pops in his expression, softened by a smile that brightens as she echoes his words from before. He crouches down beside her, watching the little frogs hop over the rocks.

He can't remember when the whole frog thing started. He'd loved the fairy tale of the frog prince when he was little, but he always wished it had a different ending — he thought it would be much more fun to stay a frog. When his brother received from their grandfather a snow globe with a crowned frog squatting at its center, he'd coveted it. So much so that years later, Erik let him have it, a consolation prize for disappointing their parents and getting shipped off to a new school.

When he dreamed he was a god, his followers left him carvings of frogs in wood and stone, little figures molded from clay or sewn from cloth. The frog, which begins as a little black speck swimming around a pond and then grows legs and learns to hop out, was a symbol of evolution. Transformation. Now, Wilhelm likes to think of it that way.

One speckled frog leaps closer, unafraid of him. He glances at River.

"Are you going to give them names?"

She had always found it somewhat amusing, that their domains would come to overlap while also being vastly different from one another. Evolution and transcendence - two heralds with different approaches to the notion of change, of becoming a new version of yourself. But where Wilhelm came to symbolize growth, the natural progression from simple to more complex life forms, River represented a departure from the world as they know it, leaving behind all that's considered normal or rational.

It makes sense. He's always been more grounded than her. In many ways, he's a normal teenager finding his path into adulthood while River is just trying to be a whole person.

She's always looked up to him, feeling so much younger and less mature despite not being that far apart in age. Something about this has a certain childlike innocence, like two kids wandering through the woods together and naming wild animals. River smiles warmly, breathing a little easier than she has in what feels like a long, long time.

"I hadn't thought about it. The first animal I named was Guò." The little nutkin riding around in Thancred's pocket. River grins at Wilhelm. "We can both name them. They're yours too. Wanna take turns?"

What are their names? he'd once asked Simon, his first and only time at the other boy's house. And as Simon stumbled through his fish's names, Wilhelm slid his arms around his waist and kissed his neck. The memory is a fond ache now, not the sharp prod it used to be.

For almost a year, he'd kept in his domain replicas of those fish. Olle, Oski, and Felle, preserved in the glass of a fishbowl, until last spring, when he finally released them into a lake and said good bye to a lot of things he was still holding onto.

He's not the same boy he was when he got here, but even so he'd be surprised to learn how much River looks up to him.

"Wanda let me name one of her ravens Ferrari." He grins, knowing it's kind of a ridiculous name for a bird. "Okay, let's take turns."

Lowering his hand to the stone, he waits for the nearest frog to hop into his palm. When it does, he carefully cradles it close, inspecting the pattern of its spots as if he might be able to commit it to memory. He doesn't know how they're going to tell them all apart.

"I don't know how to tell if it's a boy or a girl... Um...what about...Sigge?"

[open] I was tame, I was gentle, til the circus life made me mean

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maybe move to a wrap soon? c:

ok! c: